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The Quartet was originally set up to persuade a
recalcitrant Israel to allow the United Nations to have a role in the
peace process. It was also an oblique American token recognition of
Russia’s vestigial Great Power status, which allowed it a squeaky wheel
in the peace process, if not an actual hand on the helm. Comprising the
European Union, Russian and American leaders, along with the U.N.
secretary-general, the Quartet’s function was to encapsulate U.N.
influence and isolate it from the corpus of decisions made by the U.N.
membership. The U.N. members, even after the fall of the Berlin wall,
were, of course, much less amenable to U.S. congressional pressure, and
thus AIPAC’s influence.

Like any institution, the Quartet has changed over the
years, but its main purpose has been to preserve the appearance of
“doing something” about the Middle East, while avoiding doing anything
that could produce practical results—above all putting any form of
pressure on Israel.

It drew up the famous roadmap, then went along
complaisantly when Israel, with American support, crumpled it into an
origame finger pointed at the Palestinians. Then it watched, apparently
hypnotized, as the peace process stopped proceeding. It had a brief
moment after the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla—but even then its
main function was providing some diplomatic relief for Israel, rescuing
it from the international consequences of its own aggressive actions.

Throughout, the Quartet has been a classic fob off for
the international public, giving the appearance of action, but none of
the reality. Its unique structure of two Security Council members and
two multilateral organizations gives it a permanent fudge factor. It was
a fascinating display of fuzzy diplomacy, as the Quartet adopted
increasingly vacuous lowest-common-denominator positions—which
Washington then ignored. The other members of the Quartet did not want a
public display of their impotence, so they let the Americans, and by
extension the Israelis, get away with it unchallenged.

It then developed a new function—how to express U.S.
gratitude to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his unstinting
support of the illegal war on Iraq. As the Quartet’s special envoy, the
oleaginous Blair, the most overtly pro-Israeli of recent British prime
ministers, was allowed a prominent place on the world stage—and,
according to contemporary news reports, the U.S. State Department paid
his salary and expenses.

It is a measure of how ethical standards worldwide have
slipped that there is little or no public outrage that a former British
prime minister should be able to masquerade under quasi-U.N. auspices
while being paid for by the Americans, usually to do the bidding of the
Likudnik govenment of Israel. Blair’s job, in which he officially
succeeded former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, is to boost the
Palestinian economy. However, while Wolfensohn was occasionally
outspoken when exasperated by Israeli frustration of economic growth,
Blair has sedulously avoided doing anything that would inhibit his
income stream from the Americans and all his sundry highly paid speaking
engagments.

It is true that in June Blair declared independence of
Israel by confirming support for the new Palestinian coalition
goverment, but after all it is Washington that pays his bills, and Kerry
also has shown considerable exasperation with Israeli inconsistencies
over the peace process.

In the end, however, apart from keeping Tony Blair busy,
the Quartet’s only achievement has been preservation of its own unity—a
singularly useless feat. It is time to dissolve it, bury it, burn it
and force the various parties to state their own positions and hold on
to them.

Double Standard on Human Rights

In other news, Ban Ki-moon has just appointed Prince
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, one of the most dynamic and effective of Arab
diplomats, to replace South African Navi Pillay as High Commissioner for
Human Rights. Being quite effective herself explains why Pillay was
reappointed for only two years instead of the usual four. Like almost
every other previous incumbent, she fell foul of the U.S. for being
outspoken about human rights violations around the world including, of
course, Israel.

The U.S. double standard on Israel, which includes
ignoring the State Department’s own reports, provides cover for many of
the Arab nations’ double standards, which in turn gives Israel’s
supporters cover for pointing out those double standards. While it would
be difficult to claim the Hashemites as paragons of human rights, they
tend to be less worse than many of their neighbors, and Prince Zeid, who
represented Jordan at the U.N., has played as good a hand as he could
with the constraints of representing his government. More to the point
is that he has consistently supported initiatives in support of
international justice, notably the International Criminal Court.

While looking at international justice, yet another
report ignored by the U.S. was that of “the U.N. Special Committee to
Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the
Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories.” It
expressed grave concerns about the reported worsening health conditions
of more than 75 Palestinian detainees on hunger strike now in hospital
protesting Israel’s continued use of administrative detention.

The fact-finding commission called on Israel to accede
to the demand of the hunger strikers to end the practice of arbitrary
administrative detention of Palestinians. “It is a desperate plea by
these detainees to be afforded a very basic standard of due process: to
know what they are accused of and to be able to defend themselves,” said
the committee.

Compared with worldwide attention to, say, Irish hunger
strikers, it is almost unreported that a first group of around 100
Palestinian administrative detainees launched a peaceful protest on
April 24 and since have been joined by a couple of hundred more. The
committee pointed out that “International humanitarian law only
exceptionally allows for the use of administrative detention, yet the
Israeli authorities have detained a large number of Palestinians for
reasons not explicitly indicated. Initial administrative detention
orders of six-month periods can be renewed an indefinite number of times
without producing charges.”

Included among those imprisoned under Israeli administrative
detention are no fewer than eight elected Palestinian legislators. So
much for bringing democracy to the Middle East! ❑

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Ian Williams

Tribune Published: July 27, 2014

Not
long after Margaret Thatcher was elected, an otherwise progressive
friend of mine confessed that she had voted Conservative, “Because
Maggie was a woman.” I do hope that she has had some sleepless nights
since then. We should be happy to see good women (and men) elected, but it is an unsustainable idea that estrogen any more than testosterone is in itself a
qualification for high office. Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir,
Angela Merkel might all have lactated at some time, but one does not
associate them with the milk of human kindness, and they would all have
been suitable for a casting call for Lady Macbeth.
Nothing became Barack Obama like his predecessor. As I wrote at the
time: “His election might not be the Second Coming, but to pursue the
eschatological metaphor, it would mark the end of the reign of the
Anti-Christ.” However, despite the fawning press from the liberal
punditocracy, if Obama disappointed you, just wait until you see Hillary
Clinton. We are talking Tony Blair with boobs here.

Rarely can there
have been a power couple more convinced of their self-importance than
the Clintons, but within that couple it was Hillary who had more the
messiah complex and stiffened the back of the invertebrate Bill when he
wobbled in his fervor, as he so often did.
She stood by her man, and behind him, almost certainly urging him to
“Do the right thing” to get the couple into the White House. That
included flying back from the campaign trail to Arkansas as governor to
sign the execution warrant for Ricky Ray Rector, the brain-injured
condemned man who proved his unfitness for execution by saying Clinton
seemed a nice guy – and asked to save the dessert from his last meal
until afterwards. She was also an active partner in throwing black
academic Lani Guinier to the neo-con wolves when they ran a campaign
against her as a “quota queen”. Guinier had proposed a multi-member
constituency system to allow minority representation without the
ludicrous gerrymandering that blights American democracy. Nominated for
an office by Clintons, her old friends, when the Wall Street Journal
weighed in against her, they cut her loose politically and
professionally.
Much praised for her forbearance in agreeing to work with Obama when
he so unforgivably defeated her, such forgiveness did not extend to
defectors from her camp. It is clear that there is a little mental black
book waiting for payback time for them. Bill Richardson, one of the
more principled Clinton appointees, was saying only recently that his
card was still marked, six years after he had endorsed Obama – and had
had the decency to call Hillary to tell her what he was going to do.
“Let me tell you”, he said then, “we’ve had better conversations.”
Hillary was notoriously responsible for making sure that the
insurance companies got their pound of flesh in the Clinton healthcare
proposals – and so bears some vicarious responsibility for excluding the
single payer NHS option from Obamacare. After all, insurance companies
are major healthcare donors. She backed her husband when the took huge
steps to demolish FDR’s New Deal by supporting “welfare reform” that
penalised poor and working families and put lifetime limits on
unemployment benefits. She supported him as he rewrote the regulatory
framework to allow the banks which had supported his campaigns so
lavishly to reshape the financial system in ways that brought about the
economic crash. And we are supposed to forget all this because it might
end up with a president who, very occasionally, wears a skirt?
Personally, I would rather have Prince Charles in a kilt.
The brouhaha about her is drowning out much more substantial
candidacies on the left. Senator Elizabeth Warren has an appreciation
for what is wrong with the country, and knows more is needed than just
getting an ambitious and self-serving female in office. She challenges
the neo-liberal consensus, embraced by Hillary, which has led to
disaster for the 99 per cent. And, beyond tokenism, Bernie Sanders is
one of the few honest men to enter Capitol Hill and has the populist
credentials to take on the Tea Party on its own ground with
working-class and middle-class victims.
Choosing between a Hillary endorsed by oodles of expedient Wall
Street cash and a Republican backed with crazed ideological money from
the far right will be a tough choice.

Thursday, July 03, 2014

Published: June 29, 2014 Last modified: June 25, 2014

It
is fitting that the Tea Party has a completely fictional symbolism for
its ideology. In reality, Sam Adams and the other “patriots” were
throwing duty free tea overboard in Boston Harbour to preserve their
monopoly of smuggled – and thus more expensive – tea in the New England
markets. But the Tea Party’s aversion to paying taxes of any kind, to
anyone, does represent a consistent string to the tea bag story.
This month, the Tea Party combined with the American system of
primary elections to mount yet another tangential triumph sending all
sorts of contradictory messages. The number two Republican in the House
of Representatives, Eric Cantor, lost his bid to be the Republican
candidate for his Virginia seat. It is measure of the age of unreason
that Cantor, a poisonously reactionary shill for moneyed interests,
appeared as a moderate when the Tea Party united to defeat the
seven-term incumbent. It is almost heartening that he lost despite being
backed by lots of campaign funding from the businesses he did so much
to serve during his time in Washington.
There are many lessons from this about American politics. Cantor is
so far to the right that he would have been almost unelectable 40 years
ago, even in Virginia. In those days, the South was virulently racist,
but it was quite appreciative of populist government measures that
benefited the white poor and middle class. When the Republicans
re-conquered the South from the old Dixiecrats, Cantor helped to bring a
virulent neo-liberal ideology to the South, and from that base tried
with some considerable success to impose it on the rest of the country.
It is the combination of Dixie racism and Ronald Reagan’s California
neoliberalism that has reshaped the global political landscape.
For ideologues like Cantor, the racist dog whistle was just a
convenient tool to persuade poor and middle-class white Southerners to
vote for their own economic destruction, and so he made two big
mistakes: one was to be relatively rational on immigration reform, and
the other was to be too visibly interested in national politics. In the
words of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill: “All politics is local” – and
Cantor neglected his base, concentrating on his national ambitions,
both personal and political. The successful Tea Party candidate
emphasised that – and also Cantor’s subservience to the banks. It has to
be said that few, if any, successful Tea Party candidates vote against
big money when they take office – but they do talk about it.
Little remarked in the American media, the vote also represents a
major defeat for the Israel lobby, for which Cantor was a fervent
advocate. The lobby often claims success in overthrowing any candidate
who had been in the slightest way critical of Israeli policies, but they
are keeping understandably quiet about their abject failure to keep
Cantor in power, which is a double failure since the lobby’s reputation
rests on its ability to marshal funding for or against candidates. In
this case, the well-funded Cantor’s loss signals that money is not
necessarily everything in an election.
The success of the “insurgent” Tea Party candidate has emboldened
many other contenders, so the inner-part conflict within the Republican
Party will be accentuated even more, as two sets of reality-challenged
reactionaries battle within it for dominance. The reaction of what
passes for “moderate” candidates will be to adopt even more hardline
positions – in effect, granting ideological victory to the rabid wing of
the party.
However, these primary victories are within a small subset of the
voters. The turnout for the primary elections is very low at the best of
times, so a small, motivated group of voters can choose a party’s
official candidates – who the majority of the actual voters in the
general election might well find irrational and unsupportable.
Once again, the loopiness of the primary system comes into play. In
many states, there are open primaries – which means that you do not even
have to be a nominal supporter of a party to vote in its primary to
pick the candidates. So now so-called moderate Republicans are trying to
persuade black and Latino voters to support them in primaries against
the more extremist Tea Party candidates.
Do Ed Miliband and his advisors really know the practical consequences of their zeal for primary elections?

More columns than the Parthenon

Born in Liverpool, now resident in New York, "Tequila," "UNtold" "Deserter," "Alms Trade" and "Rum" author Ian has written for newspapers and magazines around the world, ranging from the Australian to The Independent, from the New York Observer and the Village Voice to the Financial Times. He is the UN correspondent for Tribune, and senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.
He has pundited on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX, CBC and innumerable radio stations, for example appearing on Hard Ball,the O'Reilly Factor, and Wolf Blitzer. Online he writes for Salon, AlterNet and MaximsNews, among many others. He appears in Comment is Free on Guardian Unlimited.
His books are listed below - click and buy!